Sermon, 2-12-23, CHS, Evan Graham Clendenin
Happy are they who observe his decrees *
and seek him with all their hearts!
If you turn on your tv, or fire up your handheld surveillance capitalist tracking device, you will be reacquainted with all the junk out there competing for your attention. How can we avoid but turning our soul to this or that daily heart-rending or anxiety-inducing news item, prophetic voice or big pharma influencer. And if that is the house built for us, it can be really hard to know yourself, to get a feel for what you say no to and what you say yes to, to have a feel, an acquaintance, a home in your own heart, a heart more and more whole. And it is in the heart that the psalmist, a voice speaking to us from long ago, speaking to us as if the one speaking had already heard our great need and desire, it is in the heart that we seek God. “Happy are they who observe his decrees, and seek him with all their hearts.” God wants a home with us, a real place, built right, and for us to know our home with God.
I took note of the discussion that spontaneously erupted at the end of the parish annual meeting-in a good way. Trust me, I’ve seen it happen otherwise. You raised the matter of affordable housing on Vashon Island as something to seek with all your loving and wise hearts, as ones who follow the loving requirements of Jesus. And you came to a resting point, just as someone wisely clued us it that it was lunch time, that affordable housing is a bigger issue than a small church with a loving heart could take on by itself. It was a brief but honest conversation about what was stirring in you- a feel, a sense of “Yes” to life and blessing, and also a wise ‘no’, an awareness of your own limits, lack of knowledge, need for others, and maybe proclivity to bite off more than you can chew in a moment of inspiration or righteous concern. It was an honest conversation about letting your yes be yes and your no be no, a movement toward simplicity and plainness and gentle but unvarnished honesty within your common life. It was a coming into the knowledge of the heart. Really, really it was.
And this is at the heart of the work that Jesus calls us into, expects of us as ones growing and maturing in our faith, and maybe maturing into being loving and wise elders. The call to such eldership is one the world may need right now, and which is somewhat undervalued in many churches. Our present age doesn’t seem to teach or model skills or values to tending life in common; your smart phone conveys no shortage of models for nursing grievances and resentments, and for discrediting or actively pulling down the institutions that make common life work. One of those may just be eldership, and the implicit thought that sometimes, someone else may just know better than you. Lean not on your own understanding but trust in God with all your heart” we can read in the book of proverbs. But much more than that-eldership means becoming the kind of people whose hearts can make room for others to come to know their own hearts. Whose simplicity and honesty invite self-knowledge and clarity of desire, who let our yes be yes and no be no, who gently but firmly clarify the way for us when we grieve and rage, or become distracted, with whom we find a moment’s worth of home.
I wonder if the lack of housing for our bodies, scandalous and in need of redress as this is, doesn’t paper over a deeper lack of housing for our hearts. I’ve been reading a 12-century theologian Hugh of St Victor the past several years, he says that God builds a place within us to dwell. It is a house within our hearts, and we are part of that building process. From out of our distracted attention-people were distracted in the 1100’s too-, we begin to assemble the pieces and the pattern and the process for a renewed heart, built on the sure foundation, centered, stabile yet ready to follow the word, the way of the one who calls us. We deal with the details and complexities of money, and conflicting, murky interests, geology and zoning, to set the posts plumb. It’s all a chance for heart work, the work of listening and honesty, of recovering and tending our capacity to know, to pay attention, and go about what God has asked us to do with simplicity, honesty and hearts desiring the better way with which Jesus, and our faithful elders and God have reacquainted us.